puns. winter.

Dasht-e Tanhai. The Wilderness of Solitude. Watching the leaves fall under a grey sky, eating my breakfast alone among the tops of trees, a branch fell on me today. New York, the New York of last night's forced gaiety and diffident lust so far away. Alone on a park bench, in the wind and under the sky, in the middle of Manhattan I might as well be in a Robert Frost poem. Or in that other cityscape of loneliness; the crumbling ruins of Mehrauli lost in thorn scrub and plastic bags, across the road from the radio playing the latest Hindi film song hits.

Dust-e Tanhai. Or what accumulates in a room not vacuumed, cause no one is expected. Books and papers strewn all over the desk, the rug, the bed, the floor. Books and quarters. Antidote to too wistful a gaze across the bar after a beer too many. The memory of a blazing afternoon at the Pyramids, as the wind from the desert blew sand into my eyes at the same moment as all the mosques in Giza began their afternoon azaan; rising into the wind the dust the sky. If only I could believe.

Dast-e Tanhai. The loose motions of loneliness. That dis-ease that makes me say too much, and always at the wrong time...